Event on 3/4/05 in Novato.
Novato resident Roy Rogers, whose company name, Chops Not Chaps, is a reminder that he's not the deceased cowboy star but the very much alive slide guitar virtuoso and record producer who's been nominated eight times for a Grammy and just nominated for a 2005 W.C. Handy Award as Best Blues Guitarist for his work on his latest album, "Live!", recorded in Chico.
Chris Stewart / Chronicle less

Event on 3/4/05 in Novato.
Novato resident Roy Rogers, whose company name, Chops Not Chaps, is a reminder that he's not the deceased cowboy star but the very much alive slide guitar virtuoso and record ... more

Photo: Chris Stewart

Photo: Chris Stewart

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Event on 3/4/05 in Novato.
Novato resident Roy Rogers, whose company name, Chops Not Chaps, is a reminder that he's not the deceased cowboy star but the very much alive slide guitar virtuoso and record producer who's been nominated eight times for a Grammy and just nominated for a 2005 W.C. Handy Award as Best Blues Guitarist for his work on his latest album, "Live!", recorded in Chico.
Chris Stewart / Chronicle less

Event on 3/4/05 in Novato.
Novato resident Roy Rogers, whose company name, Chops Not Chaps, is a reminder that he's not the deceased cowboy star but the very much alive slide guitar virtuoso and record ... more

Gaynell Toler couldn't believe her eyes when she first laid them on Roy Rogers at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

"My first reaction was, 'Wow, he's white,' " the New Orleans native now called Gaynell Rogers remembers of that first sighting in 1980 when the Vallejo-reared slide guitarist was celebrating the release of his bluesy album with harmonica player David Burgin.

"I'd heard the record on the radio, it was a great record, and when I saw Roy I thought, 'How is this guy playing guitar like that? He's not Southern, and he's not Afro-American.' "

And he's not that Roy Rogers, although he was named after the singing cowboy to please his older brother Billy, a cowboy wannabe.

This year Gaynell and Roy celebrate the 25th anniversary of that introduction, and the 21st of their marriage. It's a silver anniversary also for the Delta Rhythm Kings, the trio fronted by Roy and in significant part promoted and publicized by Gaynell.

"We've been working the world, so to speak, for over two decades," says Gaynell, and it's clear that the couple, now based in Novato, is not about to slow down. First, there's the release of Roy's first live album, "Live! At the Sierra Nevada Brewery Big Room." He was the first musician featured in the PBS series "Sierra Center Stage," which features performers at the brewery's Big Room, a 350-seat live music venue in Chico; there's his Saturday-morning radio show on KRSH-FM in Santa Rosa; he's working on a new project with legendary cowboy songster Ramblin' Jack Elliott; and he's hosting a Slide Guitar Summit at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival next month. There are also the imminent tour dates with the Delta Rhythm Kings to Italy, Switzerland and Norway.

Roy's molten mastery of the guitar, though it's based in blues, transcends racial and national boundaries. For four years, he toured with the late blues veteran John Lee Hooker, and he's been featured on albums with Bonnie Raitt and Italian superstar Zucchero, who goes by one name.

"I'm fortunate in that I have a unique style that nobody plays like," Roy says. "You have to take all your influences, and I listened to all kinds of stuff, but it's that raw emotion that always carries the day."

Some of his earliest influences came from his mother, Luverne Rogers. "She was the kind of person -- and I probably got it from her -- if she was cleaning house and felt like playing, she'd stop and go down to the piano and just play," Roy remembers. "She played these old standards from the '30s and '40s, and she had a great ear, so I'm blessed with a great ear."

Married to William Rogers, a veteran captain of the Liberty Ships, Luverne gave birth to Roy in Redding. The family moved to Martinez and then Vallejo, close to William's post as a supervisor of the Suisun Bay mothball fleet.

A vintage photo on the back of Roy's new "Live!" album pictures Roy as something of a rock prodigy in 1963, when he was a student at Vallejo Junior High: a short kid in a gold lamé jacket recruited into a high school dance band. In fact, he was already straying beyond rock, "taking lessons from a very influential teacher, Joe Wagner, who put me in that whole direction of Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, B.B. King, Chuck Berry and all that stuff," Roy says.

A few years later, Roy was busing down to the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, not so much for the rock as for blues giants John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, whom Bill Graham integrated into his bookings.

"I never liked psychedelic music, it wasn't emotionally connected," Roy says. "The thing that did impress me was, here were these middle-aged black blues guys who were pouring their hearts and souls out on stage, no holds barred, not trying to be cool, just raw stuff. I said, 'I wanna do that.' "

In the mid '60s, the teenage bluesman started focusing on the older, rawer Mississippi Delta style of blues. This style demanded sonorous "open" tunings and the use of a bottleneck, or metal cylinder, to slide up and down the guitar's fretboard. Roy's placement of the bottleneck on the pinkie of his left hand freed him to play rhythm and baseline elements of a song, while making melody with the slide, a kind of one-man band.

Roy earned a history degree from Cal State Hayward and briefly considered the life of a club musician but decided he "didn't want to play the flavor of the month." Instead, he pursued the music closer to his heart in the company of harmonica player David Burgin, and worked day jobs to stay solvent. A comment by a Midwest critic, to distinguish the slide guitarist from his namesake, led to the naming of Roy's song publishing and record company: Chops Not Chaps.

During this same period, on the opposite coast, Gaynell Toler generated her own future career by programming and promoting talent at the University of South Florida. She continued this activity after graduation, founding a booking agency in Atlanta. When her illustrator boyfriend's contract with Levi's brought him out to San Francisco, Gaynell tagged along, ultimately making her own way in the West Coast advertising and music scene and encountering Roy at the Great American.

About three years after that first meeting, "I had parted ways with my significant other, and Roy had gone through a separation from his first wife," Gaynell recalls. The pair reconnected at one of Roy's gigs in North Beach, and began dating, despite Gaynell's conviction that "I did not want to go out with a musician, because I knew the lifestyle and I didn't think I wanted any part of it because I wanted a family and some normalcy."

Setting up housekeeping with him, Gaynell discovered that "Roy is in fact one of the most grounded human beings I've ever met, and unlike any other artist I had come across. He's kind of like an old Southern gentleman, in a way."

Gaynell assumed marketing responsibility for Roy's newly formed Delta Rhythm Kings band, recognizing that "he wanted to stick to his roots of blues and rock, and to do it in a very grassroots way." She also shared parenting of Sam, Roy's young son by his first wife.

In 1982, by a connection through his bassist, Steve Ehrman, Roy was tapped to join the touring band of one of his blues idols, John Lee Hooker. The gig lasted four years, and led to Rogers serving as producer on Hooker's Grammy-winning albums "Chill Out" and "The Healer," for which Rogers co-wrote one track with Hooker and Carlos Santana. Rogers was later recruited by Hooker for the soundtrack to Dennis Hopper's film "The Hot Spot," on which they jammed with jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. "I don't think it could get any higher than that," Roy says with a sigh about that Grammy-nominated project. "It was intense. And people I don't know will come up to me and say, 'Oh, that's my favorite soundtrack.' It's dark, and it's deep."

Hooker, in a 1991 interview with this writer, summarized his admiration for his producer and fellow bluesman. "Roy is a beautiful person," he said. "He'll tell you what he thinks, but if you don't like it, he'll let you do it your way."

In 1984, Roy and Gaynell married, and two years later, after Roy had returned to his own home and band, Gaynell gave birth to their daughter, Jessica. On subsequent tours with the Delta Rhythm Kings, "We took our kids along whenever we could," says Gaynell. "We had friends in the music business that also had young kids, and we kind of parented together."

"And we had also decided to move from the city to Novato because we wanted a family community that we could fit into," Gaynell says. "And lo and behold, we ended up in a place where a lot of musicians were doing the same thing. The kids had their rhythm in the school system, with sports and arts and theater and music."

Marin County and the wider Bay Area also provided Roy with world-class musicians for gigs and albums. Aside from current Kings Steve Ehrmann (bass) and Billy Lee Lewis (drums), they've included Norton Buffalo, Tom Rigney, and vocalist Shana Morrison, (Van Morrison's daughter), with whom Roy waxed the charming "Everybody's Angel" in 1999.

Roy recorded steadily while raising his family, releasing his first all- instrumental album of original material, "Slideways," in 2003. Several albums scored Grammy or W.C. Handy awards or nominations. Despite his success, Roy says, "I always told my kids, music should just be a part of your daily life, not a special thing." His son Sam, now a Forest Knolls resident, is an a cappella vocal artist billing himself as One Mouth Band. Daughter Jessica is studying theater at Colorado State.

Gaynell is compiling a cookbook, to be called "Gaynell's Kitchen: Natural Southern Cooking From a Down-Home Girl." It combines her roots in Southern cuisine with her activism as a breast cancer survivor. Celebrating his wife's five years clear of the disease, and following up on her earlier training as a cook in Italy, Roy financed her study at the Bauman School of Holistic Nutrition and Culinary Arts in Sonoma.

"When I was first diagnosed, I was volunteer communications director for the Marin Breast Cancer Watch for a couple of years," Gaynell says. "I met some of the most amazing women who are dealing with an epidemic of sorts, because Marin has the highest rate of breast cancer in the country.

"And when you hear you have cancer, it's pretty earth-shattering. So I've been coaching newly diagnosed breast cancer patients for a couple of years, and teaching their loved ones how to cook for them during radiation and chemotherapy so they can boost their immune system and regain clarity quicker. " Although she jokes that Southern cooking with organic foods is an oxymoron, she's tested her recipes back in Mississippi and found them accepted by bona fide Southerners.

Though Gaynell is still subject to Southern homesickness, Roy is devoted to his own home base, recently contributing a rare Roy Rogers solo gig as a fund-raiser for Rohnert Park radio station KRCB (it sold in 20 minutes, for $1, 000).

"Maybe at some point I'll make a record for a major label to get broader distribution," Roy says, "but at this point I don't really need to do that. I'm a niche player, and I can carry my niche all over the world. I'm as busy as I want to be."

Let it slide

Roy Rogers & The Delta Rhythm Kings appear with Jackie Greene at 8 p.m. March 26 at the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma. Tickets cost $20. For more information or to buy tickets, call (707) 765-2121 or visit www.mystictheatre.com.

The Sierra Center Stage series, which featured Roy and the Kings in its debut run last year, is due out this fall in DVD format. Records by Roy Rogers & The Delta Rhythm Kings are available through Roy's Web site (www.roy-rogers.com) and the CD Baby Web site, an online record store that sells CDs by independent musicians.